Summary about the community

Summary about the community

The value and role of community:

• The community is a non-core function and can be enhanced through the community (NetEase Cloud Music).
• Community is the theme, serving as a channel for B-side manufacturers in specific fields (tap tap is a channel for game manufacturers, Haohaozhu is a channel for decoration companies)
• The community is the main body and serves as a channel for e-commerce companies to monetize their crops (Xiaohongshu)

When discussing communities, we must first talk about the positioning of communities, which can be divided into the following three types:

• In a community centered on a circle, the core of the content is the theme surrounding the circle, and more emphasis is placed on the memes and connotations of the content to resonate with consumers. This type of community will cover a wider range of people, and the content will give users the feeling that they belong to a circle and a specific user. For example, Hupu, Douban, Zuyou and so on.
• A people-centered community, the content itself focuses on personal characteristics, and the content gives users the feeling that it belongs to the author himself. The main function of tags and sections is to navigate content. The content produced by this type of community comes with products, so the core of the content is pictures or videos. This type of community covers a specific group of people, such as Xiaohongshu, Douyin, Weibo
• Communities with mixed circles and people: such as Jiji, Zhihu

The main differences between these communities are reflected in the following (mixed types will not be distinguished)

• Community governance authority

  • People-centered community: authority is handed over to the official (in the future, the flow control of goods delivery needs to be handed over to the official)
  • Circle-centered community: authority is given to users (autonomy of senior players will improve the playability of the community)

• Fan influence and user relationship

  • People-centered community: Fans have strong influence. Once consumers recognize you, they will recognize the content you produce. For example, instagram, Xiaohongshu
  • Circle-centered communities: Fans have weak influence, and producers’ personalization is vague. What consumers like is related content in this circle, rather than content generated by a specific person, such as Douban and Hupu.

• Content production tools

  • People-centered community: We will add filter effects, stickers and other edits to personalize the content of the table as much as possible
  • Circle-centered communities: Basically relatively simple, the content is emphasized to be related to the circle theme.

• Content consumption experience

  • People-centered community: The value lies in the posts themselves. The producer is the subject and the consumer is the receptor.
  • Circle-centered community: The value is not only the post itself, but the replies are still valuable. Producers and consumers are on the same level, and consumers can also be converted into subjects through replies. (That is to say, anyone can participate in content production, which is more conducive to converting consumers into producers)

• Commercialization

  • Exclusive business model for people-centered communities: regular advertising, traffic monetization, planting grass and bringing goods, self-operated e-commerce

  *Business model that can be used by anyone: membership (restricts everyone, only gives you privileges; add some vanity logos that others don’t have that you don’t have, such as instant, Weibo), regular advertising

Although there are differences in community positioning, there are also regular basic operations

• Start, early through content or people that target users are interested in
• The user’s preference tag will be collected upon first use for content recommendation.
• Content organization structure, sections, tags, posts, to facilitate users to find content
• Interaction between users, likes, favorites, replies, to facilitate communication between users

Regarding general means of content production:

• Lower the threshold for content production
  • For content creators, provide creative support with materials, creative courses, and community communication.
  • Featured production filters or templates, low threshold to generate interesting content
• Bonus production

  • Mental stimulation

    • Points, reputation levels, and badges encourage users. In this type of fandom, level can reflect the user's seniority. Points can be redeemed for some virtual props that are more practical in the community.
    • Likes, favorites, fans.

    *Official event operation, providing traffic support

  • Material incentives

    • Plant grass and bring goods in exchange for commission income (only applicable to commercial content communities)

    *Official material subsidies and official activities encourage users to produce high-quality content and give material rewards.

About the community’s active retention:

It is observed that most unexpanded subdivided communities on the market are not very active.

For example, the jump game community and the Meishijie recipe community. The tool attributes of these communities are too strong. Whenever I visit such communities, I will only open them when I want to try cooking or try to find new games.

Let’s compare the more active communities: Hupu, Zuoyue, Xiaohongshu, and Instant.

Hupu: Updated sports news every day, and also operates daily must-see list-type content. The content and topics are rich and topical, and the content and topics are also relatively rich.

Far right: Because funny content is updated every day, I want to open it every day in my free time.

Xiaohongshu: The content is rich enough, the producers are relatively professional, the content itself is of high value, and the recommendation mechanism is closer to Douyin. It will recommend similar content that I may like more based on my browsing traces.

Instantly: see new news and funny and entertaining information every day

To sum up, the core point is to have content that users want to read every day.

• The content type cannot be too single. If the tool attributes are too strong, you need to add some information and entertainment content, because these contents are more frequently needed by people.
• You can add a daily must-see recommended module, and the recommendation mechanism should also refer to user behavior.

Take a closer look at the jump. It happens that this community is recruiting products, so I took a special look and found the following problems:

• Some circles are meaningless. This community has expanded too quickly. The content in many sections is produced by the same author and lacks likes. Even the same type of content posted on Xiaohongshu or Douyin will get higher traffic and likes. There should be a selective and gradual increase in circles to detonate content (of course it may also be a problem with the distribution recommendation mechanism)

*The value of some posts is not clear. Some posts are question posts, and the value is the reply. Personally, I feel that the content can be divided into experience, life dynamics, and questions. The value of the content will be much clearer.

• Since the community has expanded from games to all aspects of life, a part of the personal profile should also be set aside to reflect these, such as adding photo albums and modules that emphasize personal information. Currently, we can only tell from personal information whether he and I are game enthusiasts, but we know nothing about whether other hobbies in life are similar.